Justice Minister Muhammed Al-Issa has launched a system of fast disposal of legal cases at the Social Status Court (SSC) in Riyadh.“The system of making decisions in a single sitting on cases that do not require detailed study has been implemented in the Social Status Court in Riyadh. The system will be extended to other courts gradually,” Al-Issa, who is also chairman of the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC), said while inaugurating a system of special courts, including courts for commercial and labor disputes and courts for implementation of verdicts issued by other courts.

GAUHATI, India: Police say nearly 1,000 people dragged two suspects out of a police station and beat them to death in anger after the rape and killing of a 5-year-old girl in India’s remote northeast. Police officer Apur Bitin says 15 police officers were injured in Monday’s mob attack in Tezu, a town in Arunachal Pradesh state. Bitin said Tuesday the mob first demanded that the two accused be handed over to them. They later dragged the two out of the police lockup and attacked them and the heavily outnumbered police. The girl had been killed in the nearby village of Namgo eight days ago. Pema Khandu, the state’s top elected official, ordered a magistrate to inquire into the matter.

The 20-year-old was found guilty of stabbing two people in cold blood. One of his victims was only 9 years old. The murders set out a manhunt in the populous state of North Rhine-Westphalia in March 2017.

Two suspects have been taken into custody for stealing and hacking to death a pregnant goat at a petting zoo, authorities in Berlin said Monday, in what may be part of a larger killing spree.

Police arrested two Romanian men on Sunday as they fled over the fence of the Haseheide petting zoo, normally a serene place for parents to take their children to look at cute animals and go on pony rides.

One of the men was found with a knife with traces of blood. Not far away police found a backpack with animal legs and blood-smeared gloves, Berlin Morgen Post reported.

A curly-white haired Angora goat named Lilly was reportedly found with its throat slit and body parts separated, in a brutal act that resembled a recent similar incident.

Chinese officials have demanded an American man be "severely punished" after he was accused of stealing the thumb of one of the famed terracotta army while it was on display in Philadelphia.

Michael Rohana was attending an "ugly Christmas jumper party" at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia when he snuck off into the restricted Terracotta Warriors of the First Emperor exhibition, according to court documents.

He then allegedly used his phone to inspect the 2,000-year-old statues, taking a selfie with one before going in for a more permanent memento, snapping its thumb off and putting it in his pocket, according to the FBI.

The FBI traced the item back to Rohana after the Philadelphia museum noticed it was missing on January 8.

Rakhmat Akilov said he wanted to murder Swedish citizens when he stole a truck and drove it down a busy shopping street in Stockholm last April, killing five and injuring several others. The Uzbek national addressed Stockholm District Court for the first time on Tuesday morning. He is accused of terrorism for mowing down pedestrians on the Drottninggatan street on April 7th, 2017. He had previously sworn allegiance to Isis, though the jihadist group has never claimed responsibility for the attack.

Prosecutor Hans Ihrman started Tuesday's questioning by asking what he had wanted to achieve.

"I wanted Sweden to stop fighting the caliphate. That they would stop sending their soldiers to war zones and stop sending huge sums of money to fight our caliphate," Akilov, 40, told the court.

Akilov pleaded guilty to terrorism on the first day of the trial last week. Whether or not the court finds him guilty will come down to if it is determined his acts were intended to seriously harm Sweden as a country.

Asked how he had intended to harm Sweden, Akilov said:

"Get hold of a car, drive this car on a central street in Sweden and in that way harm Sweden," he said, adding that his goal had been to "murder Swedish citizens".

“I used all of my vacation time and days off to do this,” Malinowski says. “My family time suffered. I’m a little worn out by it.”

Invited to Chicago by Supt. Eddie Johnson to lend his expertise after the city suffered one of its bloodiest years in decades in 2016, Malinowski was hired under a $1.1 million contract between the city and the University of Chicago Crime Lab. The lab’s job: to help build and operate Strategic Decision Support Centers, where officers and civilian analysts monitor gunshot detectors, surveillance cameras and other data to pinpoint where crimes occur and where they might happen next.

Among the many charges levied against former race car driver Scott Tucker, the convicted payday loan scam artist should also be credited for being the most prolific generator of crime and punishment news in motor racing.

Sentenced in January to a 16-year-and-eight-month prison stint, and ordered to pay $3.5 billion in fines for the predatory lending practices of the multiple payday-loan businesses he operated, Tucker’s prized bounty—the dozens of race cars purchased for his defunct Level 5 Racing sports car team—have already been liquidated in an auction to recover some of his ill-gotten gains.

And in a new development, his rich collection of personal cars and other lavish belongings are being sought by the government to satisfy some of the staggering debt he’s been assigned by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.

According to Tucker’s hometown Kansas City Star newspaper, the “forfeiture order seeks government possession of several of Tucker’s bank accounts, several Porsche and Ferrari automobiles, high-priced jewelry and two residential properties owned by Tucker — one in Aspen, Colo., and the other in Leawood near the Hallbrook Country Club.”

Rob Duke's insight:

America in contrast with Europe: Adversarial and punitive.

Some might argue that we're tough because White Collar Crime has often been ignored, but it's difficult to make that argument when so few bankers were punished for the "Great Recession".

FOR a quiet country, New Zealand has a peculiar problem with gangs. It is reckoned to have one of the highest membership rates in the world. In a population of 4.7m, police count over 5,300 mobsters or “prospects” who are angling to join. Cumulatively, that makes the groups larger than the army. Bikers like the Hells Angels and posses from Australia are among its 25 recognised groups, but two Maori crews dominate: Black Power and the Mongrel Mob. They are remarkable for their subcultures as much as for their size. Members signal their allegiance by sewing patches onto leather jackets or branding themselves with dense tattoos. A closed fist marks Black Power, which took its name from the American civil-rights movement, and a British bulldog signals the Mongrels. In all, Maori people make up three-quarters of the country’s gangsters.

They have dominated the gang world since the 1970s, when many had moved to the cities where they endured discrimination and ended up in poverty because of difficulties finding work. Opportunities have improved since, but life is often harder for indigenous people than for other New Zealanders. They do worse in school, suffer poorer health and die younger. Some turn to the gangs in search of power or oblivion. Some become members in jail, forced to join a crew simply to protect themselves. Others seek something more positive: whanau, or community. Many recruits join simply because their fathers are members. The gangs, they say, are like a family.

Most New Zealanders never encounter this underworld, because violence generally occurs between the gangs, and even those turf wars have abated in recent decades. Today much of the gangs’ criminal activities relate to drugs. Corrections officers say that foreign syndicates use the biker groups to distribute methamphetamines. Gang members account for over 14% of the charges of conspiracy to deal methamphetamines, and of murder, laid in New Zealand. They fill about a third of prison cells. This partly explains why over half of all the nation’s inmates are Maori, although they make up only 15% of the population.

The popularity of methamptamines within the gangs has also undermined them. A handful of leaders have banned the drug’s consumption after witnessing the damages its has wrought on their communities. Some have attempted to clean up their branches in other ways. The groups used to have horrific reputations for gang rape, but Black Power now prohibits it, and has also moved to reduce domestic violence more generally. Female associates of that group and of the Mongrel Mob report that their lives are much improved. But while reform-minded members of the more established groups are maturing, a younger set of L.A.-style street gangs is rising in New Zealand, many of them Maori and Polynesian. Their bling-obsessed teenage recruits are violent and unpredictable—and are quickly filling up the prisons.

I kind of wonder if this is a cultural thing and if these gangs originated elsewhere but established themselves in New Zealand. It's weird that a country that seems to be so peaceful and laid back and have it together could have such a wild problem with gangs. I do like the fact that some of these gangs are reforming and not adhering to the natural way of doing things for most gangs.

I think its interesting how the older and more mature gang members sought to change some of the bad parts about the gang culture like gang-rape and the use of methamptamines. With that it is hard to see that the new and upcoming members are unpredictable and problem inflictors. I also find it interesting that New Zealand has such a big problem with gangs. My aunt and uncle travel there almost every year and always talk about how kind the people are there. The article did talk about that and how the gangs usually only have problems with the police and rivals, but I never would have guessed it was this bad. Like gangs in the united states we can see the resemblance in their motivations, drugs. I think a good way of stopping or helping these people would be to create more community involvement programs for the youth. Get them active in a safe environment so they don't feel the need to join a gang.

JUHA JARVINEN, an unemployed young father in a village near Jurva, in western Finland, brims with ideas for earning a living. He has just agreed to paint the roofs of two neighbours’ houses. His old business, making decorative window frames, went bust a few years ago. Having paid off debts, he recently registered another, to produce videos for clients.

Mr Jarvinen says that for six years he hoped to start a new business but it was impossible. The family got by on his wife’s wages as a nurse, plus unemployment and child benefits. He had a few job offers from local businesses, which are mainly in forestry, furniture and metalwork. But anything less than a permanent, well-paid post made no sense, since it would jeopardise his welfare payments. To re-enroll for benefits later would be painfully slow.

Mr Jarvinen’s luck turned in January, when he was picked at random from Finland’s unemployed (10% of the workforce) to take part in a two-year pilot study to see how getting a basic income, rather than jobless benefits, might affect incentives in the labour market. He gets €560 ($624) a month unconditionally, so he can add to his earnings without losing any of it.

If Mr Jarvinen is making progress, it is too soon to draw overall conclusions. Kela, Finland’s national welfare body, which runs the pilot, will not contact participants directly before 2019, lest that influences outcomes. Instead it monitors remotely, using national registers of family incomes, taxes paid and more. (Anonymised data will be made available to researchers.)

Some lessons are emerging. Olli Kangas, who helped to design the study and now runs it for Kela, says the process is far harder to implement than expected: “a nightmare”. He decries politicians who blow hot and cold, yet insist the study must be wrapped up before an election in 2019. He calls them “small boys with toy cars, who become bored and move on”. Finnish politics is intricate: the Centre party, Greens and a far-left party back the study. So does a libertarian wing of the conservatives, hoping to pare the welfare state. Sceptics include traditional conservatives, many Social Democrats and big unions.

Such unions, with (mostly male) members in permanent jobs in heavy industry, manage unemployment funds and do not want to lose control, so they dislike the idea of a basic income, says Mr Kangas. In contrast the idea appeals to those who represent part-time service staff, such as (mostly female) cleaners or retail workers. He says surveys show the wider public wavering: 70% like the idea of the grant in theory, but that drops to 35% when respondents are told that income taxes—already high—would have to rise to pay for it.

The study’s design faced constraints. The constitution ordains equality for all, so getting permission to afford some welfare recipients special treatment was difficult. That limitation, and a budget of only €20m (plus diverted welfare funds that would have otherwise gone to the recipients), restricted the sample size to just 2,000 people. Mr Kangas frets that might prove too small to be statistically robust. And it limits the questions the study can investigate.

He would like to try similar grants on those with low-income jobs, to see if such recipients choose to work less, for example. It would also have been instructive—if expensive and politically difficult—to give grants to residents of entire towns to see how local economies are affected. The timescale is another limitation. Kate McFarland, of the Basic Income Earth Network, which has promoted the idea of basic incomes since the 1980s, says a two-year study is too short to learn how the psychology of beneficiaries changes.

Whatever its flaws, the pilot is a good example of the Finnish penchant for social experiments. Participants will be followed for ten years to identify long-term effects. International interest in the pilot programme has been intense. This month television crews from South Korea and Sweden have been queuing up to see Mr Kangas; he regularly lectures abroad and advises others on similar studies. Just getting started counts as a success, he says. “This is trial and error, and the door is now open for better experiments.”

TEHRAN – Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Sadeq Amoli Larijani has said that he will not “tolerate” any form of corruption in the judicial system, pledging to publicly name all judges that were involved in such practices.

Justice Minister Mohammed Al-Eissa will launch Tuesday a system of special courts that will deal with family-related legal issues, such as divorce, alimony and custody, said Fahd Al-Bakran, Justice Ministry spokesman.Civil affairs departments and courts will be established in Riyadh, Makkah, Jeddah, Madinah and Dammam to review such issues, he said.“This is an extension of earlier efforts aimed at helping Justice Ministry courts bypass general courts and instead, resort to independent courts to get their cases settled,” he said.

The Justice Ministry has allocated SR1.22 billion to construct 22 new buildings for courts and public notaries in different parts of the Kingdom, said Justice Minister Mohammed Al-Eissa.Addressing an Eid Al-Adha ceremony at the ministry, Al-Eissa said the ministry would continue its efforts to develop judicial services.The development process will continue with the support of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah, he said, adding that the new projects form part of the King Abdullah Judicial Development Project.

A restaurant with a twist is drawing food connoisseurs to the Colombian city of Cartagena. The "’Inmate" restaurant opened a year ago inside the San Diego women's prison and is run almost entirely by the prisoners themselves. The idea is to give inmates the chance to learn new skills they can use once they're released.

A baker jailed for attempted robbery lost his appeal to keep his job after the court in Frankfurt ruled an employer could terminate his contract. The accused had tried to compare his jail term to paternity leave.

I’m not going to lie. When I first read this headline, I laughed a little bit. I have no idea how German law works when it comes to employment and having a criminal conviction, but this seems obvious that an employer can terminate your employment while your in prison for 2 years. What I find interesting is that he tries to use the excuse that if he was to have a child he would have paternity leave and thus his job could not fire him. Now I don’t know how paternity leave works in Germany but having a family and committing robbery are completely different.

A court in Iraq has sentenced German teenager Linda W. to six years in prison for her involvement with "Islamic State" (IS) jihadis, German media reported on Sunday.

Citing judicial sources in Baghdad, broadcasters NDR, WDR and the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported that the 17-year-old was given five years for being a member of IS, as well as an extra year for entering Iraq illegally.

The trial took place before a juvenile court in the Iraqi capital and was not open to the public, the reports said. The verdict could not immediately be independently verified by authorities in Germany.

A 58-year-old man has been given a record-breaking fine for theft at a Munich supermarket, the Munich District Court has reported.

Police arrested the man in December after he was caught taking calf liver and repackaging it as lower-cost fruit. He used the self-checkout line to purchase the meat for a fraction of its cost, estimated at being between €13 to €47 ($16 to $58). It was the fourth time in a month he had taken liver and re-packaged it as fruit, the court reported on its website on Monday.

The man had been remanded in custody in December after failing to prove he had a permanent address in Germany. At his trial he gave a full confession but was unable to give a motive for his actions.

The court fined the man €208,000 ($258,000), citing his exorbitant monthly income and previous offenses. The fine was calculated on the basis of 260 days at €800 per day. The man was released from custody.

The man, who can not be named under German reporting restrictions for legal cases, was given a 2-year suspended sentence in 2013 for concealing foreign bank accounts and fined €440,000. He was given a further 21-month sentence after giving a false foreign address in a tax assessment case in 2015. He was only released in 2017, just a few months before being caught taking the calf liver in the Munich-Haidhausen store in December 2017.

A huge brawl between 20 people in the Pont Neuf area of the capital resulted in five people being hospitalized for knife wounds and other injuries. At around 8.40pm on Monday February 18, up to 20 people gathered close to the Forum des Halles shopping complex in central Paris to take part in an almost medieval battle.

Thought to all be members of rival groups belonging to Paris’s Tamil community, French TV channel BFMTV reported, some of the men are believed to have pulled out knives and fought each other to the death, or at least the brink of it.

Two people were taken to Paris hospitals after being stabbed, one several times in the back, the other in the head, abdomen and leg.

For the most part I don't agree with Pakistanis judicial processes. In this case I respect it. This article didn't explain the facts of the case or how they were sure the man was guilty, but assuming they were right or had solid evidence; the best outcome happened. In American this case would have taken much longer than 4 days and depending on the state he would have most likely been sentenced to life in jail. To me that seems like a waste of resources and money on someone that doesn't deserve to live. However, I believe that life imprisonment (specifically solitary confinement) is a much more harsh and deserving punishment for people like him.

MANY stock images of India’s cities show cows lying by the roadside or ruminating in the middle of the street as cars and bikes swerve around them. The animals, sacred to Hindus, have a licence to roam. Earlier this month the state government of Uttar Pradesh proposed making medicines with their urine, which is rumoured to cure cancer, eliminate wrinkles and prevent ageing. Their dung is believed to absorb harmful radioactivity. The animals’ status is now so high that in recent years “cow vigilantes” have taken to attacking and sometimes killing people they suspect of trafficking in cattle intended for slaughter. Thirty-seven such attacks were reported in 2017, many more than in previous years. Just last month a mob in the eastern state of Bihar beat up a truck driver whom they suspected to be carrying beef.

It was not always so. D.N. Jha, a historian, writes in “The Myth of the Holy Cow” that beef, along with other varieties of meat, was often used in the haute cuisine of early India. But sometime during the second millennium BC, with agriculture evolving, cows were increasingly considered more useful as a source of milk, manure and ploughing power than as meat. Fast-forward to the 19th century AD and for upper-caste Hindus the eating of beef had become a taboo. Cows were central to the first big riot between Hindus and Muslims, in Uttar Pradesh in 1893, which took place after Muslims had been stopped from slaughtering cows during an annual festival.

Most of India’s 29 states have either banned or restricted the killing of cows. In Gujarat it is punishable by life imprisonment. Rajasthan has a cow-welfare ministry. In the “cow belt” of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, “cow protectors” armed with bats, swords and guns look for vehicles that are transporting cows across state borders. They have been known to extort money from drivers without verifying whether the cows they carry are being sent to slaughter or, in the case of meat, whether it is indeed beef. In a country where relations between some Hindu and Muslim communities remain especially fraught, this behaviour does not necessarily reflect greater religiosity. But politics does seem to matter. According to IndiaSpend, a data-journalism website, 97% of all cow-vigilante attacks reported since 2010 took place after the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014, with Narendra Modi as prime minister. Most have targeted Muslims and Dalits (formerly known as untouchables), who traditionally skin the carcasses of cows. In a report published in January, Human Rights Watch, a global campaigning group, wrote that the Indian government has failed to investigate the attacks in credible fashion, while “many senior BJP leaders publicly promoted Hindu supremacy and ultra-nationalism, which encouraged further violence.”

The costs of the attacks are high. India’s $83bn dairy industry has taken a hit. Farmers are increasingly unwilling to expand their herds, as it is hard to get rid of unproductive livestock. Shelters for old cows are often overcrowded, says Kavita Srivastava, an activist. In Rajasthan a 10% surcharge is levied on stamp duty to fund the shelters. In many states boxes outside shops encourage people to donate towards their upkeep. But the system is opaque. “No one knows where the money ends up,” says Arjun Sheoran, a lawyer. Some steps would improve the situation. Stricter laws that recognise cow vigilantism as a crime against minorities could be enacted. Victim-protection schemes and faster court rulings could be funded. And more stringent punishments could be meted out to those who use cows as a pretext to exacerbate communal tensions. But moves of this nature will be difficult in a country where a judge claimed just a few years ago that cow dung was more valuable than the Koh-i-noor diamond.

This is actually so interesting for me because my family is from India. India has such a corrupt justice system and corrupt government, they can't deal with murders and rapes properly but cow vigilantes can be front page news and the biggest thing to be happening right now. I find it interesting that this article makes it sound like the government literally cares more about cows than they do about people. Which isn't too far off to be honest, cows are extremely sacred in India and to those who are old fashioned and stick to the more original beliefs, I can see why this would be an important issue to them. I just think this is the wrong way to handle things and that there are so many other ways to go about the whole situation.

In my opinion, I think Americans have a more self-fish attitude while driving. I lived in Alaska, Indiana, and Colorado and have noticed a trend that people do not care about other drivers. All they care about is heading to there destination. I think is true even when emergency services are trying to go to a location. I have seen plenty of drivers ignore the lights and sirens because they simple don’t care or they are just not paying attention. Solely based on the video, I think Germany culture is more based on helping each other then caring only about themselves while driving a vehicle.

A French court has ruled a 29-year-old man who had sex with an 11-year-old girl must face rape charges, after prosecutors initially said the sex was consensual.

Authorities in September charged the father-of-two with sexual abuse of a minor under 15, which carries a penalty of up to five years, instead of rape of a minor, punishable by up to 20 years.

But on Tuesday the presiding judge in Pointoise, near Paris, ruled the man faced the wrong charge, and postponed the the trial, in what the defence called “a victory for victims”.

Defence lawyers say the man met the girl in a park and the girl voluntarily followed him to an apartment and consented to sex. They also say their client, then 28, thought she was over 15.

The girl’s family filed a complaint for rape in the town of Montmagny, but prosecutors apparently believed the suspect did not use violence or coercion. French law defines rape as sexual penetration committed “by violence, coercion, threat or surprise.”

Rob Duke's insight:

This illustrates the shared power of the investigative judge, the prosecutor, and the bench judge.

I can't believe that the prosecutor in this case and the jury in the case mentioned in the end don't see a 29 year old convincing a 11 year old to have sex as coercion. As well as the defense attorney to say that this case isn't about a child because she was nearly 12. Im glad the judges decided that the man was facing the wrong charge and hope they go for a a rape conviction. On the flip side I can see why the prosecutor may have chosen to go for the lesser charge, after the other case found the offender not guilty. The lesser charge would have a higher conviction potential.

I'm curious as to what the legal age of consent is in France? Because even if the man were to assume she was 15, she's still a minor and still not mature enough to make a decision to have sex with a man almost twice her age. This is definitely a case of coercion, it's pretty easy for a man of that age to do what he needs to do to convince a young and vulnerable girl to do what he says. I'm always surprised at what defense attorneys have the guts to say in child rape cases. It astounds me.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.